Artist: Eddie Antonini
Genre(s):
Metal: Power
Discography:
When Water Became Ice
Year: 1998
Tracks: 11
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Eddie Antonini
Artist: Eddie Antonini
Genre(s):
Metal: Power
Discography:
When Water Became Ice
Year: 1998
Tracks: 11
Monday, 23 June 2008
Pete Wentz - Wentz Lied About Basement Honeymoon
LATEST: PETE WENTZ was lying when he told fans he and new bride ASHLEE SIMPSON were honeymooning in their basement earlier this week (beg19May08) - the couple was actually holidaying in the Caribbean.
New photos show the pop couple frolicking in the surf of Turks and Caicos.
Wentz phoned in to Ryan Seacrest's Los Angeles radio show on Tuesday (20May08) to 'reveal' he and Simpson were lying low and recovering from their weekend (17May08) wedding in their basement.
He said, "We're in the basement on our honeymoon with these blow-up palm trees."
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Sunday, 22 June 2008
Alexis Petridis offers tips to avoid lyrical minefields that have lured pop's biggest names
Starting with tomorrow's paper, the Guardian is giving away a series of eight booklets on the works of some of the greatest pop lyricists of all time - Springsteen, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Chuck D and so on. It would be nice to celebrate this event by ruminating upon what makes a truly great lyric that will ring down the ages and stand the test of time. But it's a thankless task. There's something paranormal about truly fantastic lyrics, something that evades capture and analysis. It's probably for the best: you don't want to spoil the magic by taking them apart.
So how can you emulate the eight lyricists selected? The best advice we can give may be to explain what not to do. The art of writing good lyrics may be beyond our understanding, but the art of writing really bad lyrics is a straightforward business. Indeed, how not to write a lyric can be explained by eight simple rules.
Don't allow your political convictions to get the better of you
You're angry about some terrible injustice, you take up your pen and commit your rage to paper in the belief that your song will chime with thousands around the globe. That is all well and good - some of the greatest songs ever written have been motivated by anger - but remember to go back and check through your lyrics once you've calmed down a bit, asking yourself three questions.
One: has my indignation at the world's manifold unfairness inadvertently caused me to write a well-meaning song about an impossibly hackneyed topic? Remember: just because people can't argue with the sentiment doesn't automatically mean that it won't make them want to slap you. The gold standard here is attained by Mel C's righteous tirade against homelessness, If That Were Me: "Is it lonely where you are/ sleeping in between parked cars?"
Two: if I say these words out loud in a Cockney accent, do I sound like a cab driver? This is something Richard Ashcroft should have tried with Bitter Sweet Symphony: "Try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die/ What do you make of these asylum seekers, then?/ And don't get me started on the bloody congestion charge."
Three: has my indignation caused me to overlook the fact that my lyrics don't scan at all and thus lumber along like the straggler in a donkey derby? If so, don't despair, you're in the company of John Lennon, with his catchy paean to Angela Davis ("Angela, they put you in prison/ Angela, they shot your man down/ Angela, you're one of the millions of political prisoners in the world"), and Ian Brown ("Save us from warmongers who bring on Armageddon/ Save us from all of those whose eyes are closed to the plight of the African child").
Be really careful when dealing with sex
Obviously, it's the fundamental topic: rock'n'roll is named after a euphemism for it, after all. But tread carefully: more appalling lyrics have been inspired by sex than any other subject. If you want to see how bad it can get, look up Kool G Rap's Bad to the Bone, a lyric that I can't really go into here because it's so impossibly repellent that reading it is an utterly shattering experience, from which one emerges with a horrified sense of never wanting sex again. Suffice to say it contains the line, "I got chicks on my dick like a human shish kebab". The rest of it isn't as romantic and charming as that.
Make sense
A difficult one. Obviously, you're not writing an instruction manual here: plenty of songs don't make any sense and are fantastic, including the splenetic outpouring of surreal imagery that makes up I Am the Walrus and most things written by Mark E Smith. But other songs just don't make any sense: see Noel Gallagher's ongoing struggle to grasp the difference between fast and slow, up and down, Little and Large.
Don't go with the first thing that comes into your head
Heed the sorry tale of Björn Ulvaeus of Abba. He was one half of the premier pop technicians of the 70s, crafting singles of such dazzling perfection they sound like they had been dreamed rather than written. Alas, doing that left little time for writing lyrics for albums. He later told a journalist that he would sit up all night unsuccessfully trying to write words for certain songs, then desperately take any rubbish into the studio to prove he'd been working hard, hoping his band members would veto his efforts. "But actually," he lamented, "they didn't care." Hence, King Kong Song ("What a dreadful mighty killer/ That big black wild gorilla") and Sitting in a Palm Tree, in which a man deals with romantic rejection by sitting in a palm tree ("I will stay here among my coconuts"). Hence also Dum Dum Diddle, a song about a woman who feels sexually threatened by her partner's violin ("You are only smilin'/ When you play that violin").
Check your facts
Obviously, you are a rock star, unbound from straight society's mores. What need have you for research? Nonetheless, you need to check your facts, because if you don't, you might write Star by Primal Scream, on which Bobby Gillespie's pledge of undying fealty to the Black Power movement is somewhat undercut by the second verse. "Sister Rosa, Malcolm X and Dr King showed us we got power", he sang. "Their bodies may be gone, but their spirits still live on". This presumably came as worrying news to Rosa Parks, whose body was very much alive and well when the song came out in 1997.
Remember: multimillionaire rock stars do not have the same problems as ordinary people
Four and 20, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, is the gobsmacking set text here, a song that has the gall to demand the listener's pity by suggesting that being a sleepless rock star in a luxury hotel room is just the same as being a financially destitute door-to-door salesman: "A different kind of poverty now upsets me so."
Don't act as if taking too much cocaine is a mythic incident of vast significance
Or else you'll write Gas Panic! by Oasis: "What tongue-less ghost of sin crept through my curtains?"
Don't be Dolores O'Riordan
Irish quintet the Cranberries often seemed less like a rock band than a protracted (and successful) attempt to prove that a certain kind of American will buy literally anything, no matter how shoddy, with the faintest whiff of "de auld country" about it. The emerald jewels in their multiplatinum crown were the lyrics of their frontwoman, the William McGonagall of rock, scientifically proven to be the worst lyricist in history.
No major global event passed without O'Riordan hastening to the word processor and coming up with something. She sometimes wrote exclusively in cliches - the Cranberries once released an album called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. She sometimes wrote things that were trite, as on the indispensable Bosnia. "I would like to state my vision, life was so unfair," she sang. "We live in our secure surroundings, and people die out there." That was shocking news for anyone who thought Arkan's Tigers were some kind of formation dancing troupe.
She sometimes wrote things that were enormously stupid, including New New York, which declared of 9/11, "There's nothing to say," thus raising the question: then why have you written a song about it? She sometimes wrote songs like Zombie, which suggested she was only midway through learning English with the aid of an incomplete set of Linguaphone cassettes: "Another head hangs lowly/ Child is slowly taken/ And the violence caused such silence/ Who are we mistaken?"
And she wrote I Just Shot John Lennon, which features perhaps the two worst couplets in musical history: "He had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice/ Because in 1980 he paid the price," and the staggering: "With a Smith and Wesson .38/ John Lennon's life was no longer a debate."
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1200 Micrograms
Artist: 1200 Micrograms
Genre(s):
Trance: Psychedelic
Trance
Discography:
Magic Numbers
Year: 2007
Tracks: 7
Drugs, Music and Magic EP Vinyl
Year: 2006
Tracks: 2
1200 Micrograms (Remixed)
Year: 2006
Tracks: 9
Promo CDS
Year: 2004
Tracks: 1
LSD Remixes EP
Year: 2003
Tracks: 2
Heroes Of The Imagination
Year: 2003
Tracks: 8
'Sarah Marshall' ads hard to forget, skip
Spot for film ranked among most-watched by TiVo users
Sarah Marshall, one of the main characters in Universal's "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," proved memorable or at least entertaining enough to keep TiVo viewers from skipping ahead.
A broadcast spot for Universal's "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" ranked as the highest among commercials airing during a show, according to April ratings released by TiVo.
The spot ran during an episode of NBC's "The Office," which failed to make the top 10. The ad campaign for "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" also was the least fast-forwarded on broadcast primetime in April, TiVo said.
"Once again, the lack of correlation between ads viewers choose to watch, compared to the top-rated programs, is astonishing," said Todd Juenger, vp TiVo audience research and measurement. "The commercial with the highest viewership appeared in a program that didn't even crack the top 10. The highest-rated program, 'Grey's Anatomy' airing on April 24, had 33 paid commercial spots in it, but only two of them (both for motion pictures) made the top 10 commercials."
Ads for new movies comprised five of the 10 best-ranked commercials that aired during the month. Among the top five commercials were ads for the film "Hancock" during ABC's "Grey's," for Ford during Fox's "American Idol," for the film "Made of Honor" during ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and for Glaceau Vitamin Water, also during "Idol."
In terms of time shifting -- where viewers have the option of fast-forwarding and have control over the ads they watch -- the top four ads ranked the same, with a spot for the movie "Sex and the City," which ran during "Housewives," coming in fifth.
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Emma Roberts Says She'll Never Get Used To The 'Hectic And Crazy' Red Carpet
WEST HOLLYWOOD, California — To the uninitiated, the idea of strolling a red carpet in a form-fitting bit of couture, obliging the eager paparazzi with a few poses and waving to your adoring fans may seem like some sort of dream come true. But here's a little secret: It's not.
In fact, it's pretty much the complete opposite: a maddening mile of screaming photogs, blinding flashbulbs and grabby publicists, a daunting gauntlet demanding perfect poise and even better posture. All it takes is one wrong step in your stiletto heels, or one misbehaving bit of garment, and suddenly, you're splashed all over every gossip site and celeb rag around the globe. Despite what some may tell you, it is not as simple as smile, step and repeat.
And yet, the carpet is an integral part of every star's career. So, with the MTV Movie Awards just around the corner (Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, to be exact), we decided to follow Hollywood up-and-comer Emma Roberts as she prepared to walk at the gala opening of Chanel's newest store on Robertson Boulevard. At 17, she's already no stranger to red carpets, but that doesn't mean she's any less terrified of them.
"Everybody thinks red carpets are really, really glamorous, but they're actually really hectic and crazy. Everyone's stepping over everyone and talking over everyone," Roberts laughed from inside her limousine. "It's always a little bit exciting and a little bit scary. And even though I've done a bunch of them, I still get a little scared before I step out of the car."
And what, specifically, scares her the most? Well, there are actually two things, though both involve the same thing: the ever-present threat of a dress disaster.
"I get nervous when I'm getting out of the car with a dress on, because I don't want it to fly up and have a notorious picture. So I try to hold my dress down when I get out of the car," she said. "The dress is always a problem. When you're choosing one for a carpet, it's a very long process. You have to like it and it has to fit you right ... but most important, you don't want to choose one that's going to get you on a 'worst-dressed' list."
Sage advice. And while she might not be a fan of the red carpet, Roberts had better get used to walking it. She has a pair of films on the horizon — the teen comedy "Wild Child" and the family film "Hotel for Dogs" — and she just wrapped production on the indie "LymeLife," alongside "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon and Alec Baldwin. That means there's plenty of premieres in her future, which only means more carpets to brave.
"My biggest problem is that my eyes water really easily, so by the end of the carpet, I'm trying so hard to keep them open. And I've been smiling so long that my mouth really hurts," she said. "But aside from that, so far everything has been pretty good. I mean, I haven't fallen down or anything like that ... and hopefully I won't jinx myself."
The MTV Movie Awards will air live on MTV on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET! Find all the latest updates on nominees, presenters, performers, voting, contests, movie exclusives and much more at MovieAwards.MTV.com. And check out Movies.MTV.com for the latest movie news, trailers, photos and more!
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Rocky - Dreamworks Outsources Investment
After a sometimes rocky and often antagonistic relationship with Paramount executives
over the past three years, the principals of DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg and David
Geffen, are reportedly close to a deal that would see Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group
invest more than $500 million to revive the company as an independent filmmaker.
Today's (Wednesday) Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the talks,
said that in addition to Reliance's investment, Spielberg and Geffen plan to
borrow $500 million. The new DreamWorks reportedly plans to produce about six films
a year. However, no studio has yet been selected to distribute them. (DreamWorks
Animation, headed by Jeffrey Katzenberg, currently has a long-term distribution deal
with Paramount.)
18/06/2008
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The Edge of Heaven
Director Fatih Akin (HEAD-ON) flies between Germany and Turkey for this drama. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (AUF DER ANDEREN SEITE) explores the relationship between a father and son, as well as the contentious issues of immigration and bureaucracy. In German, Turkish, and English, with English subtitles.
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White Stripes win battle of Euro 2008 songs
BASEL (Reuters) - The late Luciano Pavarotti did it at Italia 90 with Puccini's Nessun Dorma, The Lightning Seeds triumphed at Euro 96 in England with Three Lions and The White Stripes are number one among fans at Euro 2008 with Seven Nation Army.
The song's catchy guitar riff is everywhere: accompanying the teams from the tunnel before matches, bellowed by fans on the streets of the Swiss and Austrian host cities, on radio and television and in shops and supermarkets.
It has easily eclipsed the tournament's official song, Can You Hear Me? by Spanish pop star Enrique Iglesias, and Shaggy's official mascots' song Feel the Rush.
Fans have dreamed up their own lyrics, such as Italians' "Cam-pioni-del-Mon-do" (world champions), or simply joined in unison to shout along with the thumping riff: der-de-de-de-de-der-der.
As Swiss tabloid Blick pointed out on Friday, it is not an especially challenging undertaking even with drink taken, which partly explains the song's success.
Russell Warby, a London-based agent for the Detroit band, said on Friday that Seven Nation Army's popularity among soccer fans started in Italy at club level before spreading to supporters of the national team.
"Football anthems are the people's folk music," Warby said. "They grow in this way."
Seven Nation Army is from the band's 2003 album Elephant.
The song's catchy guitar riff is everywhere: accompanying the teams from the tunnel before matches, bellowed by fans on the streets of the Swiss and Austrian host cities, on radio and television and in shops and supermarkets.
It has easily eclipsed the tournament's official song, Can You Hear Me? by Spanish pop star Enrique Iglesias, and Shaggy's official mascots' song Feel the Rush.
Fans have dreamed up their own lyrics, such as Italians' "Cam-pioni-del-Mon-do" (world champions), or simply joined in unison to shout along with the thumping riff: der-de-de-de-de-der-der.
As Swiss tabloid Blick pointed out on Friday, it is not an especially challenging undertaking even with drink taken, which partly explains the song's success.
Russell Warby, a London-based agent for the Detroit band, said on Friday that Seven Nation Army's popularity among soccer fans started in Italy at club level before spreading to supporters of the national team.
"Football anthems are the people's folk music," Warby said. "They grow in this way."
Seven Nation Army is from the band's 2003 album Elephant.
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